Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 43
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
295/365: Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer, 1998) (Vudu, Hulu, Sling TV, YouTube, Shudder, Apple TV)
A popular, entrancing piece of rock-n-roll moviemaking, bursting with attitude, style and energy enough to keep Germany lit all winter, Tykwer’s smart bomb plays by its own rules, reshaping and reimagining temporal experience a dozen different ways, like a live-action Road Runner cartoon wherein the passage of time is the coyote. A petty gangster (Moritz Bleibtreu) is stuck at a Berlin pay phone, knowing that in 20 minutes his underworld boss will arrive looking for a 100,000 marks that Manni doesn’t have. In mad desperation, Manni calls his girlfriend Lola (Franka Potente), a tangerine-haired punkette woken out of a sound sleep and sent on a crosstown tear to a) pickup Manni and b) somehow, some way, find the moola along the way. Does she make it? The question is moot, since Tykwer starts over from that rude-awakening phonecall three times, reimagining the breathless journey and its various serendipities and crossed paths each time until the movie itself becomes a Gordian knot of interlocking incidents and coincidences. There’s no single story or “reality” — it’s a movie, dummy, and a fast, crazy, exhausting one. Lola’s hypnotic footrace through the city glances by dozens of mini-stories (for which Tykwer frequently pauses and glimpses, in hilarious snapshots, how a bystander’s future turns out), her own philandering banker father, an out-of-control motorcycle, and the inevitable slow-moving sheet of plate glass. (Lola even has telekinetic vibes, bursting glass with panicked screams and winning a one-shot-only game of roulette along the way.) Tykwer’s restless camera and nose-thumbing screenplay are the film’s stars; Potente’s performance is 90% running, and it is mesmerizing.
296/365: Revenge (Ermek Shinarbaev, 1989) (Criterion Channel)
A pioneering edge-of-the-Soviet-era Kazakh melodrama that starts off in a Korean-lineage village in 1915, wastes no time dropping the first domino: an impatient Kazakh teacher holding class in a ramshackle barn loses his temper and kills a little boy (off-camera) with an iron axe. This single act galvanizes the countryside, and creates a web of interconnecting justices and injustices that haunt the child’s surviving family members for decades — up to the distant-thunder days following Hiroshima. The film is organized into seven chapters, each detailing a pathcrossing between the family and the murderer, and the dead serious contest between human folly and karmic currency is fierce as the quest for revenge becomes a family heirloom, passed on to new generations like a hope chest. The bulk of the story follows a son’s adult journey toward consummating the family’s vendetta, and along the way the young man becomes disassociated both from his assigned purpose and his environment, a veritable ghost. When vengeance is finally, ironically served, he’s oblivious. Shinarbaev’s movie seems unself-consciously exotic, because it inhabits a society riven by and infused with racial tensions and cultural scrambling; the imagery stands halfway between the lushness of the Chinese Fifth Generation and the Georgian peasant hyperreality of Paradjanov. But the toughness of peasant life will out; even the film’s lyricism has a cruel edge, as in one digressive sequence where children dip a huge rat in kerosene and set it on fire… and we follow it skittering across the countryside and plunging into a hay-filled barn where a drunk is sleeping…
297/365: Reign of Terror (Anthony Mann, 1949) (YouTube, Amazon)
How to characterize this underseen, historical-espionage demi-noir except as the bad seed baby borne from an unholy alliance, when sharp-eyed noiriste Anthony Mann, Satanic-pact cinematographer John P. Alton and crazy arch-modernist designer William Cameron Menzies got together to reinvent the French Revolution and the Great Terror and ended up with something like a mutant Welles movie? Or think of them as the Robespierre, Saint-Just and Marat of B-movies in extremis after WWII, treating history like a guillotinable royal, and restoring noir reflexes to their forgotten Gothic roots. The internecine machinations swirling around Robert Cummings’s undercover Lafayette spy are too abstruse to parse, and in the melee of ghoulish closeups, painted shadows, dark alleys and brooding deceit even the most familiar actors are almost unrecognizable. (Richard Basehart’s Robespierre does an icy Olivier imitation, while Arnold Moss’s scarecrow-ish assassin suggests a syphilitic Adrien Brody, and thieves the movie right out from under Arlene Dahl’s preposterous deliciousness.) Sure, the screenplay (by Mann buddy and script machine Philip Yordan) seems to be counter-revolutionary, or perhaps merely anti-autocracy, if you can untangle the allegiances and backstabbings amid the stressed–out gloom. Also titled The Black Book, and long lost in public domain and accessible only in TV prints that have been to hell and back, it’s a dark passage, especially given its semi-sublimated parallels to the HUAC thunderhead and its sweaty concern over a lost list of named names.
298/365: El Sol Del Membrillo (Dream of Light, The Quince Tree Light) (Victor Erice, 1992) (YouTube)
Only Spanish master Erice’s third film, and one of the most acclaimed films of the post New Wave-era, this semi-fictional idyll is after that titular light in an almost radical way, patiently tracking the creation of a single painting by hailed Madrid artist Antonio Lopez Garcia, a still-life of a quince tree in the artist’s small courtyard. Garcia is an old-school brand of craftsman, too, and the process takes many weeks; a lengthy and wordless opening sequence follows Garcia as he prepares his canvas, positions his easel, mixes his paints (at first, for a preliminary color study), fashions a plumbline (to determine the exact center of his composition), and even drives nails into the dirt so he’ll stand in exactly the same place every day. Garcia has an entire battery of almost totemic habits (including marking the fruit and leaves themselves up with paint), the reason for all of which becomes apparent as the film bears on. Erice intercuts Garcia’s attentive work with visitors, his wife’s daily ministrations, and a team of laborers fixing the walls in Garcia’s old house, and the effect is a genuine experience of life and art that movies rarely if ever produce. Not a true documentary any more than it is a “narrative” film in the traditional sense, Erice’s film is a meditation on creation and on the life that must surround it; Garcia is never put off by the human traffic, or even the often contentious weather. It’s all part of the process; Garcia says that just being close to the tree is what matters, and you sense that was true for Erice as well. For the discouraged filmgoer, Erice’s tone-poem can be a ray of hope in and of itself.
299/365: Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder, 1951) (Crackle, YouTube, DailyMotion, Kanopy, Amazon)
Written with such cayenne acidity it makes your eyes water, this southwest-desert noir has one of the coldest hearts of any American film, and comes closest (alongside Sunset Boulevard) for being the purest emobodiment of Wilder’s bitter perspective, which is never not leavened with his distinctively sardonic humor. This noir doesn’t cop out in the end as many do, enthusiastically following the machinations of Kirk Douglas’s completely-scruple-free newspaper man, whose ethics-free bulldozing has killed his New York career and stranded him in Nowheresville, New Mexico — where, chomping at the bit, he conspires to delay the rescue of a trapped miner so the story can be pumped into a national news event. Wilder may seem to be making a point about the press, but the shotgun spray of cynicism hits every wall, and the American human ends up nailed to one of the decade’s highest petards. It’s odd that this is the only film Wilder and Douglas ever made together; the actor — still one of the mid-century’s most underrated stars — is like a juiced-up hyena gnawing every bone in sight, juggling Wilder’s hardboiled dialogue with fascinating zest.
300/365: Le Brasier Ardent (Ivan Mousjoukine, 1923) (Vimeo, Kanopy, Archive.org)
It’s a forgotten piece of film history from the interbellum: the saga of Les Films Albatros, an emblematic production force in the larger phenomenon of Czarist Russian filmmakers relocating to France after the Bolsheviks gained complete control of their country. Centered on the mesmerist presence of star Ivan Mousjoukine, the Albatros catalogue gleefully employed all manner of au courant Soviet experimentalism, German Expressionism and saliently French cultural zest, and helped revitalize the French industry at a time when only Abel Gance and Marcel L’Herbier were taking such formal risks and nursing such reckless ambition. This film, the only film the florid, Svengali-affect star ever directed, is by far the Albatros library’s craziest entry, as well as one of the early-‘20s’ most unfettered explosions of heedless style. Mousjoukine, resembling Franklin Pangborn morphed with a raptor and imbued with cosmic self-regard, plays a dozen or so roles in this psychodrama about a distracted bourgeois (the lugubrious Nathalie Lissenko, Mousjoukine’s wife) with sexually tortured nightmares, and the supercool detective hired by her husband to reveal the source of her troubles. With his self-parodying egomania seeping rather fascinatingly into every scene, Mousjoukine tricks out the proceedings with editing hijinks, arch perspectival designs and camera tricks you could swear he stole from Murnau, Eisenstein, Epstein, Kuleshov, and Leni, if in fact their big films didn’t all follow several years after.
301/365: Dangerous Liaisons (Les Liaisons Dangereuses) (Roger Vadim, 1959) (YouTube)
Postwar Euro-film’s suave hyper-satyr, Vadim was always more content pursuing box office popularity, and fresh wives, than critical approval, but he did make the occasional stab at cool prestige-lit adaptations (Zola, Schnitzler, Sade), and this icy version of Laclos — the first — is both deft and insidiously hip. Moreau’s Juliette and Gerard Philipe’s Valmont are married here, a pair of romantic nihilists entertaining each other with extramarital competitive tales of trysts and manipulations, which reach a destructive crescendo with the all-or-nothing seduction of a ironclad paragon of virtue (Annette Stroyberg, Mrs. Vadim for that moment). Laclos’ devious narrative might be, given a degree of fidelity, foolproof, but although Vadim’s film doesn’t have the high-end word-craft of Christopher Hampton’s play (and the various versions derived from it), it has something that’s uniquely Vadim: the acute, late-’50s sense of weary, fated co-dependence between the protagonists, reflecting out around them onto a decadent postwar Europe of chateaus, cocktail soirees, and meaningless affluence. The leads provide this grim-&-glossy funeral with ample pizzazz; Philipe, who died suddenly of liver cancer just two months after the film’s release, is a convincingly silky Valmont, while Moreau dominates every room simply by watching others. It feels very much like a brand of French cinema that was already being overrun by the New Wavers, down to Vadim’s Mallean move to get Thelonious Monk to rip an original score, his only one.
Year Three Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
Year One Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
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